Tuesday, December 06, 2011

In which I offer a rare comment about my mother

I'll try to address all the recent comments, but let me start with this one, because it was the first posted, and because I want to talk about it.

Of course, I don't know you at all in real life. But my sense from knowing you online for as long as I have -- 15 years? -- is that in earliest, earliest childhood you learned to equate love with neglect, presumably because your mother neglected you. And this means that unless you take the time to retrain yourself psychologically, you're always going to equate the feeling of love with the feeling of being neglected. If there's a chance you won't be neglected, i.e. ignored, then you can't feel attachment.

You know, it IS pretty fun to be part of a team. Intimacy is really a wonderful thing. So I hope this is a conundrum you work through and I also apologize if I'm being presumptuous. You know me -- the angel who rushes in where fools fear to tread, etc.

Patrizia is one of my friends of many years from The Well. I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Patrizia, along with Celia, Catie, Donna, Dennis and a few other Well friends, helped keep me from going completely down the drain during the worst months of my adult life in 1998-99. I have never met any of them, but I feel they are as much my friends as anyone I know from the Red Cup. In fact, The Well was my Red Cup for many years.

What Patrizia says is absolutely correct. I know I've discussed this with a lot of you individually, and I've written about it here.

There are few things drearier than a grown man still whinging about his mother, so I'll try to keep this to a minimum. But as you know, Mom and I were never close, and we ended up parting ways when I was a teenager.

And because of the way she dealt with me, as Patrizia notes, I tend to be attracted to women who ignore me, neglect me, or treat me with mild contempt. (And I don't have a whole lot of trouble finding them.)

Patrizia didn't mention this part, but I think it's also true: women who treat me with what most would consider a normal level of affection or interest seem clinging and suffocating to me.

Similarly, large, normal families overwhelm me. I sort of had the notion in the back of my mind that if I ever had a LTR again, it would be with someone whose parents were either dead or lived clear across the country. I've had the experience of having in-laws hovering over me, and once is certainly enough.